Hyperlink to documents on a remote file server - RESOLVED!!!

[NG]

Hello,

I am trying to create a hyperlink to documents (Excel, Word, PDF etc..) that are located on a file server from a report studio report 8.4.1. Our cognos server is solaris and the file server is Novell. The hyperlink is created using a data item. Just to make it a little more complicated, the report I am using opens as a pdf (user requirement). Everything is fine until I click the hyperlink. I get an error like this shortened version:

Cannot find
'file:///w:%255C......doc'; Make sure the path or Internet address is correct.

The path is correct and I have network rights to the folder and file. If I use the same file path outside of cognos, I can open the file. Does anyone do something similar to this or possibly have a solution or suggestion for this issue?

Thanks,

Neil

[melee]

I don't think it is possible - your server is going to try to open the file on its end, not on your computer.

[NG]

Hello Melee

Thanks for the reply. This confirms what I have been seeing. I have even tried to modify the data item and present Cognos with a fully qualified path to the server. Cognos responded by pre-pending the Cognos URL in front of my URL. So the bottom line is the hyperlinks are only hyper linking to the Cognos server... Not very useful at all for doing anything like I need to do.

Thanks again for the reply,

Neil

[NG]

Hello again,

For anyone interested, I actually did find an answer on an IBM site this morning. Here is the URL :

https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21343953

What I have in my case is a data item called //that%20is%20a%20URL%20to%20a%20regionally%20mapped%20drive.%20I%20created%20a%20second%20data%20item%20to%20format%20the%20URL%20as%20per%20the%20IBM%20instructions.%20This%20should%20work%20for%20any%20qualified%20URL.'[url="file:///'+"]file:///'+[URL]

What had frustrated me was when I initially created this data item, I missed adding the colon : between the word file and the three forward slashes ///. Cognos would always prepend the Cognos URL when the code had this error in it. My bad  ;-}

Anyway, I hope this is useful to others trying to resolve the same issue.

Thanks,

Neil